Ghost Rider
Written & directed by Mark Steven Johnson. 2007.



NOTE: I'm going to spoil a bunch of stuff.

I have no idea what the hell kind of movie Ghost Rider was supposed to be, but even from that position, I still think I've got a leg up on writer/director Mark Steven Johnson. I never did see Johnson's Daredevil, but generally gave it the benefit of the doubt when people told me it was misjudged and underrated. Still, after its terrible flop status, I'd assumed he would never get another break like he did at a major studio picture, let alone adapting Marvel characters again. I'm much, much more wary of Daredevil.

The structure of the picture is a mess. Its first twenty minutes are spent before the story starts properly in a very broadly told story of teen angst and love. Literally, Johnny Blaze carves his and his girlfriend's initials in a tree, turns around, and she tells him she's leaving town. Wow. That was actually a little impressive.

Flash forward to the future. The first fifteen minutes of this segment are spent with ridiculous, golden flashbacks to stuff we saw as little as five minutes ago. A friend of mine likes to call this storytelling for "the slows." I don't know if I've met anyone that slow. Naturally, the love interest from his youth resurfaces as a tonally inconsistent world famous reporter that will shriek like a little girl, show the mature sympathy of la belle, and have her obligatory half-assed girl power moment. It builds this love interest, but it only really does that to have two breasts to stand around and motivate the protagonist into action he probably doesn't have control over anyway. Or does he? I could never figure that out.

The romance is so perfunctory, and it stands in sick contrast to Johnny Blaze's, uh, roadie or business manager or technical adviser or something... at any rate, his name's Mack and he's apparently Johnny's only friend. Mack is nonchalantly killed--with nary a wince from either the film or Johnny--about thirty minutes from the end.

That brings into sharp focus one of the many problems with the film: there are no stakes. Roxie and Johnny are going to survive because they're going to. Ghost Rider will always be Ghost Rider because he has to be. He can't lose a fight, because he can't. Every time one of the weird elemental side-villains seems to have our hero does something we didn't realize he could do that makes no goddamn sense. The rules are made up from shot to shot. If there's any internal logic in this film, I can't find it.

Back to the genre confusion: Personal drama is abandoned in the first hour. There's hardly enough fun for this to be even a dark, campy comedy. And it's certainly not an action film (thought that's where your local video store will shelve it). It's a problem with a number of American studio products posturing themselves as action films: there's no fighting. Battles are decided by our bad guy initiating an attack against Ghost Rider. Ghost Rider pauses, then retaliates with the aforementioned something we didn't realize he could do. What I would give to see some punches and some fight choreography.

Is it ludicrous to complain about the moral palette in a film like this? Ghost Rider employs a move called Penance Stare (visualized in the worst visual effects attempt at a trip I've seen in a while) on some random mugger. At this point, I thought he was under the devil's control (oh yeah, he works for the devil because he signed a contract by accident), but this was soon celebrated as a heroic task. Everyone is apparently quite neatly categorized into "innocent" or "guilty," and it's pretty simple to make the distinction. Hilariously, the only black character (or extra) in the film (and apparently in all of Texas or wherever this was set) is an "innocent" in the jail.

Part of the blame for this pathetic clusterfuck of a movie must belong to the source material. Superhero comics aren't my forte, but I can't imagine this character or his ill-defined universe working well, like, at all.

There are precisely three good things about this movie:

1. Nicolas Cage shaking and drinking from a martini glass full of jelly beans.
2. Nicolas Cage and his Carpenters dependency.
3. Nicolas Cage enjoying stupid monkey videos way too much.



These things are all well behind us in the first half hour, though.

Okay, Sam Elliot's always nice to have around (and in this movie, he's exactly who you think he is and it's so not a reveal that it made me kind of sad), but that's all he really is: around.

Labels: babbling about films, reviews